Broadcom changed how VCF gets supported and released. Plus, a quick update on what 9.1 has already refined in the licensing model.
A few days ago, I wrote about the new licensing model in VCF 9. After that post went out, it was clear that many architects and operators are still working through what these Broadcom changes mean for their environments, and they want honest opinions, not marketing summaries. So I am staying on the same topic for one more post, because there is more to say.
This time, it is about the support model and the release cadence. Broadcom changed both. These changes affect how you plan upgrades, how long you can run a major version before you run out of support, and how predictable your lifecycle planning will be going forward. I want to go through what changed, what I think Broadcom got right, and what you need to know before you put any dates in your roadmap.
And because Broadcom shipped VCF 9.1 on May 5, only a couple of weeks after my licensing post, I am also going to cover the licensing changes that came in 9.1. They are small, but they go in the right direction, and they fit naturally in a post about how Broadcom is changing the way you run VCF day to day.
What Changed in the Support Model
The numbers look small, but they are not. The old support model was 5+2: five years of General Support, with the option to buy two more years of Extended Support in certain cases. The new model is 6+1: six years of General Support, with the option to purchase an additional year of Extended Support in certain cases.
The key thing to understand is what actually moved. General Support is what comes with your subscription. This is the phase when you get patches, security fixes, and full support. Extended Support is something you pay extra for, available only in certain cases for customers who need more time. So when you read 5+2 to 6+1, what really happened is that General Support grew by one year for free, and the paid Extended Support shrank by one year. The total maximum window is still seven years, but the part you get for free is now bigger, and the part you have to pay for is smaller. For anyone who was not planning to pay for Extended Support anyway, this is a straight win.
This is exactly what Broadcom said in their July 2025 VCF blog announcement. They explained that the change came from customer feedback and that the extra year of General Support is included, not something you buy.
“The shift from 5+2 to 6+1. General Support (included) grew by a year. Extended Support (optional purchase) shrank by a year. The maximum potential window is unchanged.”
On top of that, the release cadence has also changed. Major releases now come every three years instead of every two. Minor releases come every nine months instead of every six. VCF 9.0 came out in June 2025. With the new cadence, the next major version is expected around mid-2028, with VCF 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3 coming in between.
There is one more detail that matters. Broadcom said that the first three minor releases in a major line, in this case 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2, will each get around 27 months of support. The last minor release, 9.3, will be the Long-Term Support release, with around 45 months of support. This makes a real difference if you have to decide which minor release to standardize on for production.
The four facts in summary:
- Support model: from 5+2 to 6+1. General Support went from five years to six. Extended Support went from two years to one.
- Major releases: every three years instead of every two.
- Minor releases: every nine months instead of every six. Four minor releases per major line (9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3).
- Minor release support: 27 months for the early minors, 45 months for the last minor as Long-Term Support.
“The cadence change at a glance. Major releases come less often, minor releases come at predictable nine-month intervals, and the final minor in each major line is Long-Term Support.”
The Cadence Change Is Good
I want to be direct here. The new cadence is one of the few Broadcom decisions in recent memory that I think really helps enterprise customers, and the reasons are practical, not theoretical.
Two-year major cycles sounded good on paper. In real life, almost no enterprise I have ever worked with could keep up with a new major version every two years. By the time a customer finished rolling out version N, version N+1 was already out or about to come out. Everyone was permanently behind. The documentation, the runbooks, the staff training, the third-party integrations, all one version behind the platform.
A three-year major cadence with a minor release every nine months fits much better with how enterprises actually upgrade. You have time to deploy a major release, stabilize it, get your team comfortable with it, and then move through the minors at your own pace. At this scale, predictability is more important than speed, and Broadcom chose predictability.
The Long-Term Support release at the end of each major line is also a good idea. It gives customers who want stability over new features a clear target. If you do not want to be upgrading all the time, wait for the LTS minor and stay on it for 45 months, which is long enough for almost any enterprise lifecycle. For customers who want new features sooner, the earlier minors still have a 27-month window, which is more than enough.
“The VCF 9.x lifecycle visualized. Releases 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2 each get approximately 27 months of support. The final minor, 9.3, is the Long-Term Support release with approximately 45 months of support. The overlapping windows give customers room to plan upgrades.”
VCF 9.1 shipping in May 2026, about eleven months after VCF 9.0 in June 2025, shows that Broadcom is serious about the new schedule. It is not exactly nine months, but it is close, and it is the first proof that the new cadence is real and not just a slide in a deck.
The Trade-off Worth Knowing About
There is one trade-off in the new model that I think is worth pointing out, even if it is mostly positive.
Extended Support has been reduced from 2 years to 1. For customers who never bought Extended Support, this changes nothing, because Extended Support was always something you paid extra for. But for customers in regulated industries, government, healthcare, or any place that needed the full two extra years to finish a long upgrade program, the option is now half of what it was.
This is not the same as the old Technical Guidance phase that some readers may be thinking of. Technical Guidance was a free phase during which products no longer received new features or regular patches, but customers could still receive documentation and limited support. The 6+1 model is about Extended Support, which is a paid add-on in certain cases. So the change is in the paid part, not in the support you get by default.
In practice, this is positive for most customers. You now get six years of General Support instead of five for the same subscription. That is real value. The shorter Extended Support window only matters if you were planning to pay for the extra time, and even then, the new General Support already gives you more years than the old one did. The customers who really lose with the new model are a small group: those who were going to combine five years of General Support with two years of paid Extended Support to get a full seven years. They now have to fit it into six plus one, with the option to buy that one extra year. For most architects I work with, this is a small adjustment, not a problem.
The Licensing Model Keeps Getting Better
In my previous post, I said that the new licensing model needed ongoing operational discipline. What I did not expect was that Broadcom would already be improving it in the very next release. VCF 9.1 came with four licensing changes that, taken together, suggest the team behind the new model is actually listening. Worth going through one at a time.
Dynamic license quantity adjustment
In 9.0, if you changed license capacity in the VCF Business Services console, you had to do reassignment work afterward. Adding cores or moving capacity around meant going back and rebinding licenses to the right environments. In 9.1, changes go through automatically; no reassignment is needed. Small change, but a real Day-2 improvement if you manage licenses across multiple environments.
Unified usage view across multiple VCF Operations instances
If you have more than one VCF Operations instance, which is normal for multi-site enterprises and service providers, you can now see your whole fleet license usage in a single view from the VCF Business Services console. In 9.0, you had to look at each Operations instance individually and put the picture together yourself. This is genuinely useful for capacity planning and for reporting consumption to leadership.
The license usage file content is now fully documented
I think this one is the most interesting of the four, because it directly answers something the community asked for. Broadcom published exactly what the license usage file contains: the usage generation timestamp, utilization details for both post-9 and pre-9 licenses, the VCF Operations instance ID, a unique identifier for the usage report, a list of unused post-9 licenses, any detected usage anomalies, and the deployment’s active status. They also clearly stated that no personal or customer data is collected.
This matters because many customers, especially in security-sensitive industries, asked when 9.0 launched what telemetry the new licensing model was sending to Broadcom. The 9.0 documentation was thin on that. The 9.1 documentation is specific. This is the right answer to a real concern.
Pre-9 and post-9 license coexistence is now official
With your first subscription, you now get both a 9.0 default license for the product and license keys for the 8.x version of the same product. You choose which version to deploy and license, but your total usage cannot go above your purchased capacity. This makes official what had previously been just a transitional arrangement. For anyone in the middle of an 8.x to 9.x migration, this is good news: you can run the two licensing models in parallel without administrative headaches.
What This Means for Planning
If you are mapping out a VCF 9 deployment or upgrade timeline, three things from this post turn into real planning decisions.
First, your General Support window is now six years from the major release date. VCF 9.0 launched in June 2025, so General Support runs until around mid-2031. If you need a specific date for a contract or an audit, the Broadcom Product Lifecycle Matrix is the source of truth, but six years from launch is the right number to use for planning.
Second, the choice between deploying on an early minor or waiting for the Long-Term Support release matters more than before. If you want stability and as few upgrades as possible, wait for 9.3, and you get 45 months of support on one version. If you want new features sooner and you can handle a planned upgrade every two years or so, deploy on 9.1 or 9.2 with their 27-month windows. Both are valid, but they mean different operational paces.
Third, the licensing changes in 9.1 are worth adding to your operational runbook before you go to production. The dynamic capacity adjustment changes how you handle adding licenses mid-term. The unified fleet view changes how you report consumption. The clear documentation of the usage file changes how you answer security team questions. None of these are dramatic, but they are real, and you should reflect them in how you run the platform.
Closing Thoughts
If the licensing post was about one change worth giving Broadcom credit for, this post is about something different: a pattern. Two announcements in a row, both good, both answering real customer feedback. The 6+1 model is not a rebrand of the old 5+2. It is a real change: the included support grew by a year, while the paid Extended Support shrank by a year. The three-year major cadence with an LTS release at the end is not a slowdown disguised as a feature. It is a real recognition that enterprises do not actually want a new major version every two years.
What I want to see now is whether this becomes the norm or stays the exception. Two good announcements do not undo the broader problems with how the VMware ecosystem has changed since the acquisition. Pricing is still pricing. Bundling is still bundling. The smaller customers who lost their natural place in the catalog have not come back. But if Broadcom keeps making operational decisions like these, the relationship between VMware customers and their platform vendor starts to look less adversarial and more workable. That would be a real change in tone.
For now, the practical advice is simple. If you are deploying VCF 9 in the next six to twelve months, plan for a six-year General Support window, decide early whether you want to chase new features through the minors or settle on 9.3 as your Long-Term Support target, and treat the new licensing model as the ongoing operational task it now is. None of these are dramatic decisions, but each one matters when you are responsible for a platform that will run critical workloads for the next five years.
Beyond licensing and lifecycle, there is a lot more in the VCF 9.1 announcements. I will cover those in a dedicated post soon. There is plenty to talk about, including increased per-instance scale, faster cluster upgrades, NVMe memory tiering, and other improvements that I think matter more than all the AI marketing in the release announcements.
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